


Her Infinite Variety

by halotolerant



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Character Death Fix, Multi, Non-binary Loki, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Shapeshifting, The Tesseract (Marvel), Timey-Wimey, Walk Into A Bar, did i think my first MCU fic would have those pairing tags no i did not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 08:06:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18634159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: “What. The actual fuck. Is this day?”“Natasha,” Carol turned. “I told you to wait in the shuttle.”





	Her Infinite Variety

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PR Zed (przed)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/przed/gifts).



> I guess I'd wanted to write a Carol Danvers fic since 'Captain Marvel', and the, uh, series of authorial choices that was 'Endgame' bugged me like a bag of knotted electrical cables until I sat and produced this thing. Which. I would not have predicted as my first and likely last foray into MCU but then MULTIPLE BRANCHING UNIVERSES, I GUESS

“You’re new,” the person sitting at the bar said, turning, and pushed a waterfall of jet-black hair over their shoulder, sitting up a little straighter, a tight green silk dress straining across their chest. Their eyes were blue and smokily made-up, half-lidded, openly assessing. That wasn’t the reason Carol had walked over, but honestly it would have been enough.

“Indeed,” Carol told them. “Which is why I want to ask you if you have a recommendation on the local distilled alcohol before I order. You get outside the Hyatt loop, you never know if you’ll lose a layer of stomach lining.”

“Well now.” Their tongue darted out, wetting blood-red lips. “How strong do you like it?” – the final consonant was fricative, tongue against teeth, and Carol felt it in the pit of her stomach.

“It’s for my companion,” Carol told them, not without a sense of regret. “The medicinal properties of alcohol for humans are generally overstated, but it’s what she’s used to, and she was dead for quite a period of time.”

That got only a momentary widening of the blue eyes.

“Well, my dear, I’ve been dead myself – or as good as – and I tend towards something in the ale range, full-bodied, you know…” They trailed their hand almost absently up the inside of their own thigh. “But that’s what I’m used to, after all; Gargion brandy may be a better choice.”

“Gargion brandy.” Carol caught one of the bartender’s eyes. “Make it two. And one for this patron.”

“Loki,” the person said, with a little dip of their head. “Thank you..?”

“Danvers,” Carol told them, and let the moment hang. There was no reason not to have just a little fun.

“What. The actual fuck. Is this day?”

“Natasha,” Carol turned. “I told you to wait in the shuttle.”

But Nat was staring, nostrils flaring, more colour in her cheeks than there’d been the past thirty-two hours. She’d been quiet, uncertain at first – and she had enough reason for it. Carol couldn’t have said how she would have expected someone to react at being pulled out of a Soulworld, so she’d asked for practical requests and been happy enough to go with ‘a stiff drink’.

“Loki? What the hell?”

“Ah, Miss Mewl.” The patron sighed, and took a large sip of their own drink.

“You’re not a girl.”

“No, I’m not,” Loki answered, and smiled brightly, all teeth. “And yet, I’m not not one, either.”

“Thor said you died on the Asgardian ark ship. If you tricked him again…”

“Hmm. That does sound like something I’d do, I admit. But I haven’t seen my dear brother since your incompetent teammates failed to capture me after that ridiculous… misunderstanding, in New York.”

“Failed to… You were sent to Asgard! You… But since then I heard – I’m sure he said…”

Carol cleared her throat. “Natasha, breathe. Have this,” she picked up the drink, handed it over. “Whatever you experienced with this person, it’s pretty likely it got copy-pasted when the stones moved.”

“Copy-pasted?”

“I’m sure the physics PhDs would say something else. OK – do you remember the original clipart? Like, 1994 clipart? How you could go into MS Paint and like, draw with the dinosaur sticker so you had hundreds on the page like it was a pen that wrote dinosaur shapes? Think that but realities not dinosaurs. Some of the realities have dinosaurs, though, probably.”

It was still not quite settled, in Carol’s head, the Carol from Before and the Carol from During and the Carol from After. The bits of her that were human and the bits of her that were other things. Sometimes the bits wanted different things, battling between wormhole-jumping and a small house in the sunset and lemonade on the porch. It was hard to tell whether she’d won or lost.

Nat raised an eyebrow. “My 1990s were not spent on MS Paint. Not so much. But anyway, Bruce said…”

 _Yeah,_ Carol wanted to say, _the same Bruce who apparently thought that if you traded a life for a soul stone, and then gave the soul stone back, you wouldn’t be able to trade round again._

It had been a long and boring flight to Vormir, and the skull-faced fascist dickhead guarding the void had tried to talk So Much, but it hadn’t been like she’d needed help; she’d let the others know at the point she reunited them with Nat.

Now Carol set her shoulders. “Listen, we’re just here to get supplies, trade for a bigger ship for the ride back. There’s plenty of time to talk – trust me, I know what it’s like to be disorientated, you can’t take it all in one go.”

“What’s on Vormir, did you say?” Loki, leaning in again, all glossy hair and… distraction. It was a very tight dress, with a kind of wet look you wanted to touch just to see how it felt. They smelt like incense and salt.

“It wouldn’t profit you,” Carol told them.

Natasha was staring at her drink, almost as though she could see through it to the floor. “You said Clint was OK. You said it was all OK. But I didn’t ask you about everyone. Are there people… Is anyone missing, still? Is Bruce?”

“Bruce is fine. We’ll talk later.” Carol wondered if anyone in this part of the universe offered peanut butter – that had been a go-to for Natasha, the relatively few times she’d seen the woman eat. “The world’s full of clipart dinosaurs and I am a living embodiment of an infinity stone that your friend Loki here is also simultaneously hiding in their bra. In a world this weird, everything is fixable.”

“Excuse me?” Loki said, instantly putting their hand to their left breast, under the curve of which the stone lay, still pulsing.

“It’s a cluster, they happen.” Carol used a sneeze of power to levitate a foot or two off the floor, looking round the room as she’d wanted to since she arrived. “Sorry Nat, I kind of had to drop by this place when I sensed it – I really did want you to wait in the shuttle.”

“A cluster of what?”

And that was the Nat that Carol remembered, that ice in her voice, that determination that she was going to master what was happening and fix it, probably. And so far, she had a one hundred per cent record so Carol figured she owed her this.

“It’s a cluster of people who hold or link to the space stone – well, the tesseract, some of them. Something in the multiverse keeps bringing us all together in kind of, well, intergalactic u-bend I suppose?” Still floating, she pointed her hand. “See over in the corner, that guy with the data pad? He’s law enforcement for a version of the Kree that integrated Asgard millennia ago. Cannon Carter – he’s Steve’s kid? And, uh, Margaret Carter and James Barnes? Did you know them too? I lost track.”

Nat swallowed, visibly. “Yeah. Uh. How?”

“Captain Rogers went back in time and created a timeline where he and Agent Carter united in 1943 to halt the work of Johann Schmidt, who was the holder of the tesseract. They broke out some POWs, there was an explosion, I think? Anyway, Cannon is genetically one third of each of his parents, and quite a bit of space stone, and he ages really slowly, I’ve met him a few times.”

“Huh.” Nat said, and took a large swig of her brandy. Wiped the back of her hand over her mouth.

“Who else?” Loki asked eagerly. They were floating too, higher than Carol which put Carol’s eyes at Loki’s chest level. Not even slightly accidental.

Carol folded her arms. “Sometimes Howard Stark turns up – he found the Tesseract in the Arctic and in some timelines he invented a single-stone infinity gauntlet. Can’t see him here, but there,” she pointed to the doorway, the group coming in, already merry and singing. “That’s the version of Heimdall that another version of this Loki creates by trying to take over Asgard – Heimdall swallows the stone to avert Ragnarok after Odin’s death. He later marries Thor.”

“Who marries Thor?”

“Heimdall,” Carol clarified, and raised her eyebrow, then laughed. “Please don’t try and change it, we’ve got enough branches on this thing as it is. And that’s just the space stone.”

“So.” Nat was frowning. “Do people associated with the other stones also… cluster?”

Carol drifted back down onto the floor. She felt like if she or Natasha were more hugging types, this would be a good time for one.

“You’ve got to be tired,” she suggested. “And we’ve got a long journey to talk about pocket universes in.”

She tried patting Nat on the shoulder. It seemed to go well. “Let’s go then.”

“Uh. Did you say you’re going to Earth?”

Carol turned, tilted her head. “Hulk’s there. And me. Believe me, it’s not worth your while unless you’re ready to play nice.”

“I can play nicer than you’ve ever had,” Loki purred, falling into step.

“Also, Thor’s gone to the other side of the galaxy with a demi-god and a racoon.”

Loki shrugged, flicking their hair back. “Plenty of time. Plenty of possibilities.”


End file.
